


The Great Barnes-Barton Prank War of ‘17

by shatteredhourglass



Series: MFD Prompts [4]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: But They're Cute So We'll Forgive Them, Clint And Bucky Are Children, Deaf Clint Barton, Emotionally Immature, Implied Sexual Content, Lingerie, M/M, Not literally, POV Clint Barton, Prank Wars, Scary Pepper Potts, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 05:12:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19805449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shatteredhourglass/pseuds/shatteredhourglass
Summary: It starts with the bucket of paint.





	The Great Barnes-Barton Prank War of ‘17

It starts with the bucket of paint.

The prank was meant for Tony- he’d been annoying the living shit out of Clint lately and while Clint would _love_ to beat his ass, Tony was already sporting cracked ribs and a broken leg from their last fight. While he feels bad about the injuries, he doesn’t feel bad enough to let the kind of needling Tony specializes in slide. Instead, he lays out a bucket of paint on the top of an ajar door and gets JARVIS to summon Stark into the lounge of the communal floor. It’s bright purple, Hawkeye colours for a big emphasis, and Clint lays himself out on the couch and prepares to watch the show.

Unfortunately he completely forgets that the common floor is called the communal floor for a _reason_ , and he also forgets that his sort-of-kind-of-boyfriend wasn’t on the mission and would be coming to look for him. Bucky, while he doesn’t fight that often, ends up lurking in Avengers Tower just to make sure Clint isn’t lying about not being hurt. (Yes, he’s done that before, and Bucky has never forgiven him for it. He’d nearly had a heart attack when Clint had passed out on the couch.)

He’s not hurt, but Bucky comes into the room to find him anyway and the paint falls exactly as god intended, with a loud clatter and a splash, and Clint cringes so hard his spine nearly relocates out of his body and into the ceiling.

Then it gets worse, because Bucky is standing there with an absolutely dumbfounded look on his face, soaked in _Hawkeye Violet_ that had been labeled as ‘ _super_ hard to remove.’ That’s not the worst part. The worst part is that the sight is so unexpectedly hilarious that Clint __laughs at him__.

The glare he’s fixed with is powerful enough that he nearly jumps through the window out of fear for his life. Bucky turns around and stalks off down the hallway instead of killing him swiftly, though, and that’s how the war starts.

“Is this a new fashion statement, dude? Should I be doing that too?”

Clint doesn’t grace him with an answer, choosing instead to accidentally trip Scott Lang as he walks past. Scott goes down with none of the grace some of the other Avengers possess, falling flat on his face with a muffled “ow.” He can still hear Sam laughing over the comms, considers accidentally losing the line of communication before he remembers they’re hooked into his hearing aids. Disgraceful. It’s too much to shoot Sam out of the sky where he’s still snickering. They’re supposed to be fighting crime, why doesn’t anyone pay attention to that _instead?_

“She’s headed your way, Clint,” Steve says, forever the adult of their group. Clint loves him. “Are you sure your new wardrobe choice is… practical?”

Nevermind.

Clint refuses to answer him, instead choosing to pull out an explosive arrow and aim it at the supervillain flying at them with an alarming amount of speed. He hits her between the eyes, watches as she’s flung back into a wall with a sickening crunch. She opens her eyes as Clint approaches her, red-eyed and furious where Clint thinks he probably just looks tired and bored. He thinks he recognizes her vaguely from his adventures with the West Coast branch.

“Hmm,” she rasps. “New trend among Hawkeyes?”

He kicks her in the head and ignores the laughing from above, and the rush of air on his bare hips and shoulder where the circles have been cut out by deft metal fingers.

Anyone who knows anything about Clint would tell you he’s competitive as _fuck,_ and this is includes badly thought-out prank wars. Bucky’s issued a challenge, here, and the first prank might not have been intentional but Clint’s never backed down from anything in his life, and he’s not about to start now. They keep it away from their shared bedroom at night, but anywhere else is fair game. Bucky opens his locker after the whole Imitation-Kate-Outfit debacle and gets a face full of rainbow glitter that doesn’t come out of his hair for _weeks_.

The night after, Clint’s at a formal event for the hearing-impaired when he sees the red laser dot on his chest. If he moves, though, some poor idiot behind him will be hit instead, so he shuts his eyes and braces himself for the hit. He kind of wishes he’d been killed somewhere else so he could be buried in something that wasn’t this uncomfortably tight penguin suit Natasha had made him wear. At least murder him in his sweatpants, goddamnit.

When the hit comes it only knocks him a few steps back and he looks down to see a red star stuck to his tie. The media have a field day photographing the notorious Avenger and hero Hawkeye fleeing the scene covered in a truly relentless amount of red stars. One particularly observant journalist manages to snap a shot of a dark shape in black on a rooftop nearby, the metal arm gleaming in the moonlight.

Unfortunately, he has his hearing aids out the night he leaves a cluster of mannequins dressed in Captain America suits in the dark hallway, but Natasha informs him that the subsequent scream echoes through the Tower loud enough to wake her. Clint comes through later to see they’ve all been shot directly in the head, and wonders if he took it too far. His doubts get erased when he runs into the range to get his bow and realizes there’s cups filled with water lining the floor, about five centimeters apart from one another.

He hears Bucky’s footsteps behind him and grimaces because there’s not _time_ for this.

It might be showing off, but he turns around and registers Bucky’s smirk, takes a running jump and gets onto Bucky’s metal shoulder. Clint doesn’t stay there long enough to get knocked off, launches himself at the rafters. With the extra height Bucky affords he can reach the beams, pull himself up and then jump across to the area with the lockers. He grins at Bucky as he drops down on the other side, blows a kiss at his scowling boyfriend before he retrieves the bow.

While that particular plot of Bucky’s fails, Clint fails to notice the temporary tattoo stencil stuck on the inside of his arm guards and a run-in with Namor means he gets soaked and spends the next five hours with dicks printed on his wrists. Washing does not help. _Tony_ laughs at him, which is even worse.

In retaliation, Clint fills Bucky’s prized cream donuts with mayonnaise.

Steve eats one too, which is an unintentional but hilarious consequence of their prank war, and Clint and Bucky are then banned from tampering with any and all food products. Bucky probably would’ve laughed at that particular event too, if he hadn’t been so busy spitting a mouthful of mayonnaise and dough into the sink. Steve’s betrayed look is one that would be more fitting on an orphaned Labrador puppy, and Clint can’t make eye contact with him for the next three days without laughing.

Clint thinks that Bucky’s given up on retaliation until he makes the rare decision to wash his hair.

Tony’s installed their bathroom with a gigantic tub and Clint likes to take advantage of it sometimes, have a nap while half-submerged in bubbles and hot water. It’s peaceful, in a way his life usually isn’t. He keeps his eyes shut during the lather and rinse, smells something chemical but doesn’t think much of it because he’s been in the medical bay for three hours. He’s also running on about two hours of sleep, so he ends up slumped against the side of the tub sleeping before he gets the chance to rinse.

When he wakes up, warm and loose-limbed from the heat and the peace, Clint slides down into the bathwater to wash it off, scrubs his hand through the stiff-feeling hair and scrubs it with his fingers until it’s smooth. He rises out of the water lazily, then registers the discoloured water and blinks. He’s fairly sure he hadn’t put any of Bucky’s weird bath salts into the tub when he’d gotten in. It isn’t that big of a panic then, either, because he assumes it’s the soap or something right up until he gets out and makes the mistake of looking in the mirror.

“I think I pull it off,” he tells Natasha as she rolls her eyes. “Pink hair’s very sexy.”

“You look like an anime character,” she informs him. “That, or a poisoned piece of cotton candy.”

Clint takes a sip of his coffee and is immensely glad that anything edible is off-limits, because even if the coffeepot had been tampered with he’d still drink it with no remorse. There’s a clattering sound from the emergency stairwell as they sit there with breakfast and Bucky runs past them like he’s on a mission, the rush of wind ruffling Natasha’s hair as he speeds past, and she turns to watch him skid around a corner and out of sight. Then she returns her stare back to Clint, slightly more suspicious this time.

Clint grins at her. “Oh, by the way, there’s twenty floors from here to mine where the bathrooms are barred off.”

He turns on his phone and squints at the apps that have now been changed to pictures of funny-looking cats, titled with things like ‘fuck’ and ‘you’ and ‘barton.’ Eloquent. Very classy for a man who can’t find a working toilet. He taps one on a whim and realizes Bucky’s signed him up for a dating site called _Love Horse,_ which he hopes isn’t what he thinks it is.

It's not, but Clint still signs him up for a daily Mormon missionary visit anyway.

The day after Bucky hires a stripper to throw her gold bra at him. Clint’s more upset that Bucky’s thought of the same idea as he did than the sweat-encrusted lingerie, because the Captain America impersonator grinding on the Winter Soldier is still _funny,_ but the wind is taken out of his sails. The horror on Bucky’s face makes up for the disappointment, though, as the guy Clint’s paid a lot of money starts to rip off his pants and reveals an American-flag patterned thong.

Steve laughs at that one too, which makes it about ninety times better, and then Clint comes back to his room to find all his underwear’s been stolen.

Not just stolen, though, but _replaced_. Clint squints at the myriad of colours in the drawer and then turns his gaze carefully to the open bedroom door. He doesn’t hear anything, even though he’s waiting for Bucky to appear and start laughing at him. There’s… nothing, though. Just him and the mess of silk and lace crumpled into the drawer. Clint turns his stare back down at the flimsy underthings and thinks, _hmm_.

“Have you got the remote?”

Clint kicks the offending villain of the week onto their side, nearly lets them drop off the side of the Tower’s roof. The ambush hadn’t really worked, and Clint wonders how clever it really is for all the Avengers to live in a giant eyesore every villain in the country can find. They roll with a groan and Clint ignores the approach of Bucky and Natasha in favour of bending down to retrieve the remote control for the giant bee-shaped robot hovering above them. There’s a helpfully large red button on the device and he presses it, hears it power down and drop to the roof with a thunk.

It’s windy up here, windy enough that Clint feels the air on the skin of his waist where his shirt’s ridden up. He remembers, then, that he’d been trying on his replacement underwear as a joke before the Robot Bee had appeared, and realizes he’s wearing jeans that are probably low-slung enough to display intricate black straps above their waistband. He’s rolled with most of what Bucky’s come up with before now, and he’s not about to give up just because of a little lingerie.

Natasha’s face is bored and Clint’s awash with relief for a second as he hopes maybe his underwear hasn’t been noticed.

The relief is short-lived as his gazes slides over to Bucky, who looks like he’s been slammed with a truck. Bucky’s face is flushed, eyes wide like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing, and then he turns and exits without a word.

Hmm.

“What do we do with the bee, Nat?”

He’s worried, for a while, and then he sits down on a cushion covering a pile of pressure-activated poppers that startle him so badly that he jumps off the chair and smacks straight into the window beside him. Natasha’s there to see that particular embarrassment, and this time she does laugh at him. Clint, looking up at the ceiling and holding his nose to stem the blood leaking out, is just relieved Bucky’s not mad at him or weirded out or anything.

Clint sticks an airhorn in a position where the doorknob will hit it on the way into their lounge and, satisfied he’s set up his vengeance for the day, settles down to watch cartoons. His hearing aids are out in preparation for the horn blast, so he doesn’t hear Bucky enter the room but he watches the full-body flinch as the door bangs into the airhorn. The smirk edges onto his face and Bucky raises his middle finger in a show of great maturity, sits down and pulls Clint into his lap.

Sleeping with the former Winter Soldier isn’t exactly a hardship, but Clint notices faintly that it’s more rushed than usual, Bucky pressing biting kisses up his throat as his hands slip up Clint’s back, get his hoodie unzipped and pushed onto the floor. Clint rolls his hips into Bucky’s, feels a stab of disappointment when he remembers he can’t hear the noises he’s making.

He catches onto what’s going on when metal fingers slip into his ratty sweatpants and find grey boxer-briefs, because for a barely-there split second Bucky looks _disappointed._

Clint opens his fridge the next morning and sees fairly innocent-looking cartons of Chinese takeaway from a few days ago, and while he knows it’s almost definitely a trap he’s also laying one of his own. It’s easy to casually reach around to scratch at his back, ruck up his shirt a few inches as he leans into the fridge to reach the box at the back. He’s got his hearing aids in this time, and even if he plays at inattention he hears Bucky come out of their bedroom, he hears the __noise__ Bucky makes.

He feigns ignorance as he turns around, box of takeout-that-probably-isn’t-takeout in hand. The flimsy chiffon ruffles brush up against the crease of his thighs as he sits down and Clint has to bite the inside of his cheek. It’s _soft_ , but he’s one of the best former-SHIELD agents on the planet and he keeps his own feelings about the panties to himself as he studiously ignores Bucky’s motionless figure in his peripherals.

“Barton,” Bucky says, and he sounds rough like he’s been eating glass, “I-”

A knock on the door interrupts him. “Buck! Time for our morning jog,” Steve calls cheerfully from outside. Clint looks up and sees the conflict passing over his face, but he’s tried to blow Steve off before for things more important than sex. The problem with Steve Rogers is that he’s oblivious (or he pretends to be, at least) so if Bucky ignores him he’ll just come in anyway. And then he’ll make his disappointed face at the two of them, and both Clint _and_ Bucky hate it.

Bucky shouts back that he’s coming, grabs his sneakers from the hallway and leaves with his hair still a hot mess. Clint tries not to analyze why _he_ feels sad, when this is supposed to be a plot to tease _Bucky_.

He opens the takeout box to distract himself and is promptly greeted with an explosion of neon snakes launching at his face.

“Alright, no more prank war, it’s over,” Tony says.

“Come on, Stark. Fucking killjoy,” Clint complains immediately, flopping dramatically onto the couch. He nearly overbalances and falls off, but Bucky hooks an arm around his leg and drags him back up again. He’s left glaring at Tony half-upside-down, arms crossed. It’s probably not very threatening to the man, but he’s trying, okay. “You’re not some kind of parental figure to us, you know that, right? That’s just Peter. You can’t put me in the naughty corner.”

“Says you, Hawkdaddy, adopter of sad Sokovian children. Look, Pepper’s going to kill you if she has to talk to one more Bible Thumper,” Tony adds.

Clint’s never felt any fear of Tony Stark in his life but his scarily-competent wife is a whole other barrel of monkeys, and he sighs. He _likes_ Pepper, and technically she could probably kick them out if they kept going with the prank war. It’s probably a good idea not to make an enemy out of Virginia Potts. He cranes his head to make eye contact with Bucky, who’s looking put-out but not particularly mutinous.

“Truce?"

“Guess we have to,” Bucky agrees reluctantly, and so The Great Barnes-Barton Prank War of ‘17 is ended with a rather sad finish.

Bucky steps into the bathroom and then stops still in the doorway, staring. “I thought we agreed to stop. Pepper’s going to…”

“This… isn’t a prank,” Clint says, suddenly hesitant as he turns to watch the reaction. The anxiety ricochets through his insides like a bullet that won’t leave his skin and he shifts on his feet, all too aware of what Bucky’s looking at right now with wide eyes. Clint’s too scared to turn and look in the mirror, but he’s been staring down at himself worriedly for the last twenty minutes. He has no idea if this is even sexy at __all__ , regardless of how Bucky’s been acting.

He’s still wearing a sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, but it’s worn-soft and pushed up enough that it doesn’t do anything to hide the delicate lace he’s got on. It’s not as raunchy as some of the other things that had been left in his drawer- far from it, it’s one of the softer things, in a blue so pale it’s nearly white. _Pretty_ , had been Clint’s first thought. The squirming in Clint’s stomach gets worse as he flicks through a thousand different insecurities and Bucky remains silent, his gaze fixed on the panties.

“God, Clint,” Bucky breathes, like he’s awestruck. Surely not. He takes a step closer, overdressed compared to Clint in his layers of shirt, henley, hoodie and jacket, stupid skinny hipster jeans.

“Yeah?” Clint’s a little defensive, he can’t help it, reflexively grabs at the hem of the sweater to yank it down over his bare thighs. Bucky’s hands move to stop him and Clint watches as he slides down to his knees with a lethal amount of grace, pushes Clint’s fingers and the sweater bunched up in them a few inches for the full view. The lace is soft and a little scratchy against the skin of his hips, but it’s immeasurably delicate in a way that’s oddly eye-catching.

Bucky’s gaze drags up to his face, heavy like a physical presence. His eyes seem dilated even from here, but it’s even worse when paired with the reverent look on his face, like Christmas has come early. His hands let go of Clint’s and he slides his fingers down Clint’s thighs instead, then back up over the fabric on the sides. “Look so pretty, sweetheart,” he says, quiet and soft, and Clint’s heart misses a beat.

He knows, in the back of his mind, that _pretty_ should be reserved for people who are exquisite, elegant and graceful in a way Clint definitely isn’t, and yet Bucky looking at him like that makes him feel like he _is_. It’s the same stomach-rolling sensation he’d felt when he’d put on the first pair of panties and looked in the mirror except far more intense, as metal fingers trace the line of his dick in the fabric.

“Can I…” Bucky starts, and his breath is already hot on Clint’s skin as he leans in, but he’s still looking up at Clint’s face like he’s been presented with everything he could’ve ever wanted.

It’s all Clint can do to gasp out a breathless “please, _yeah_ , do it,”as Bucky’s wet mouth presses against him through the panties and his knees start shaking.

“You know you could just ask me to wear them, right? No excuses needed?”

Bucky scowls at him and shifts like he’s thinking of stalking off to leave Clint sitting on the bathroom sink, seems to think better of it and stays where he is. His hair is a mess. Clint’s fault, probably, and he takes immense pride in it as he hooks one leg around Bucky’s denim-covered ass and pulls him a little closer. Bucky’s hands drift to the curve of his hips like it’s a compulsion, strokes a thumb against the lace and then tugs gently at the sweater.

“Like you in my clothes,” he says quietly, and Clint looks down and realizes it’s one of Bucky’s, a source of comfort he’d sought out without thinking. “Like you’re mine.”

“Wasn’t just the panties, then? Aw, baby.”

“’s you _in_ the panties,” Bucky grumbles. “Fuckin’ stupid, sexy idiot.”

Clint feels his face heat up. He’d kept some composure over the _you’re mine_ but that’s a little too much for a straight face, even for him. “Oh. I, uh. Thank you?”

“Idiot,” Bucky says again, but there isn’t any heat in it. “You should keep the hair, too.”

“Alright, you’re both _dead men._ Fucking-”

Clint peeks out of his nest of covers and sees Tony standing there with his hands on his hips. His beard and the side of his face is absolutely _coated_ in peanut butter. He’s still ranting, waving his hands around, but Clint just settles back down against Bucky’s chest and pulls his hearing aids out. The vibration of laughter is noticeable and Clint snorts and wonders if they’re going to be kicked out. Kicked out because of rogue peanut butter.

They’d both been here the whole time, though, which Tony’s going to realize sooner or later.

It’s going to be entertaining when he registers there’s a traitor in his midst.

He keeps the pink hair.

**Author's Note:**

> Love Horse is a real dating site. Thank you to the BDBD for ideas and motivation for this.
> 
> The goal was to keep this short and not give in to the temptation to make it a ten-thousand-word-monster, so I succeeded. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
